19 April 2012 7:32 PM

The Rationality of Anders Breivik

Anders Breivik is a rational man, insanely rational.

Breivik's argument is that in killing dozens of people, mostly adolescents, he was defending himself and all of Norway from a leftist program of immigration and multi-culturalism that was destroying Norway and all of Europe. In times of crisis, nations and even public-spirited citizens have to ignore laws and conventions in order to defend their existence. That, he says, is what President Harry Truman did when he dropped atomic bombs on two Japanese cities. Call it terrorism, of you like, but, as we say in America, "a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do."

There is nothing wrong with the reasoning so long as we accept two premises. The first premise is that Norway is overrun by Third World, particularly Muslim immigrants. This is simply not the case. Norway has a population of roughly 5 million, about 86% of whom are officially Norwegian. The largest immigrant groups come from Northern Europe, though Asians make up about 4% and Africans 1.5% of the population. If 106,000 Muslims constitute a serious threat to the Norwegian identity, that identity must be very fragile indeed.

A man who lived only in urban Oslo might draw false conclusions, just as visitors to London conclude that the UK is now a dual suburb of Africa and the subcontinent.

Breivik's other false premise is far more dangerous, though it is shared with vast numbers of political activists on the right and the left. This premise is the fallacy of civil disobedience, that private citizens have the right, or rather the duty, to take the law into their own hands so long as they are following their conscience or obeying a "higher law."

This is the premise on which members of the Occupy Whatever You Like movement take over public parks and interrupt businesses. On the same premise, environmentalists interrupt legal commercial fishing and whaling operations, "Christian" protestors invade abortion factories, destroy property, and even kill the abortionists. The American Civil Rights movement was justified on this same principle, which Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., borrowed from Gandhi, who got it from the American eccentric Henry David Thoreau, who had read too much German philosophy and Hindu theology - in translation.

But, we always hear, King and Gandhi were nonviolent men of peace.

Perhaps they were, but their movements wrought havoc and violence. If we shall know them by their fruits, then civil disobedience, which bears the fruits of riots and wars, is an ideology of violence.

For Christians, the answer to that is given by St. Paul, that we are never justified in doing evil that good may come of it. Thoreau refused to pay a poll tax in Massachusetts because he objected to slavery in the Southern states. I have a much stronger argument against paying my property taxes because they support the worthless and wicked local public school system.

Laws protecting the property of citizens should not be broken simply because other laws can be called into question. Imagine a British imperialist who, upon arriving in Canada, made up his mind to drive on the wrong side of the road or a painter who so detested the color red that he ignored red traffic lights.

For atheists and pagans, the answer is given by Anders Breivik. He disagrees with the objectives of Gandhi and King but is firmly on their side when it comes to taking the law into his own hands. Like every terrorist, including Osama bin Laden, Breivik's contempt for law and violent acts are in fulfillment of what he imagines to be a noble ideal. Robespierre and Pol Pot were idealists too, and so was Hitler. The English system of restrained and rationalized corruption is infinitely preferable to political idealism in any form.

Perhaps the most dangerous political idealist of all time was the Greek philosopher Plato, but later in life, reflecting on the melancholy condition of Sicilian politics, Plato argued that just as we cannot compel our parents to live as we think we ought to, we must never try to coerce or intimidate our homeland into adopting the policies or form of government we cherish.

What, then, are moral people supposed to sit on their hands and do nothing?

By no means. The whole point of politics, under any system of government, is to find peaceful means of pursuing one's interest and of resolving disputes. Much of the Civil Rights movement in the American South was, in fact, peaceful and legal, consisted of an appeal to the conscience of legislators, local governments, and private citizens. Only revolutionaries think change can be effected overnight and by illegal methods. The Boston hoodlums who threw snowballs and rocks at the British soldiers deserved to be shot, as they were, and the lawyer who successfully defended the soldiers (six acquitted, two convicted only of manslaugter) was none other than John Adams, soon to be the leading revolutionary in New England.

The people of Boston, on the eve of revolution, respected the law because they had a moral conscience. About the people of Norway, I am not so sure. The maximum sentence they can impose on Breivik is 21 years, though the remorseless murderer is expected to be confined in an asylum for the rest of his life. Breivik is more rational, arguing that if he is a murderer he ought to be executed, but a 21 year sentence is, as he says, "pathetic."

Once again, Breivik's logic is sound. If Norway cannot put a mass murderer to death or even sentence him to life at hard labor, it has made Breivik's case for him. Like other Scandinavian states, Norway has led the way toward moral irresponsibility and social dissolution: No-fault divorce (Breivik's parents are divorced), Gay marriage, and high rates of illegitimacy - 80% of Norwegian women giving birth for the first time are unmarried. Not to worry, though, since Norway's lavish welfare state will, if necessary, take care of these de facto wards of the state.

Globalist Marxists have made a mess of things in Europe and North America. One of their most evil accomplishments has been the destruction of moral sanity. The result is a generation of leftist anarchist freaks - Environmentalists, Gay Rights activists, One-Worlders.

Unfortunately, the most conspicuous opponents of the New World Order are not sane Christians who uphold the traditions of civility developed with so much difficulty and misery by Greeks, Romans, and Medieval Christians, but rightist freaks who are even more repugnant than the Marxist-Feminist-homosexualist freaks.

Both groups are completely detached from reality. The Left is defined by its hatred not only of the rich, but of the European, the male, the straight, and the competent, but the nationalist Right is the mirror image, hating the black, the brown, the Asian, the exotic - in other words, "the other."

Anders Breivik does not love Norway or Scandinavia or Europe. He loves only an abstraction that never existed. If you wish to see the face of Europe, just look at the photographs of Anders Breivik whose face, not concidentally, has been altered by plastic surgery. He is perfectly sane and completely mad.

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Thank you for the clarification. I admit that I don't have any idea of what I'm talking about when I say the word "State." I have a handful of vague notions, probably various strands from various traditions & experiences that twine themselves together into one ambiguous mush.

Dr. Fleming,
I'm mad at myself. I had a brilliant comment all typed out and my session expired. It even had clever references to Dickens and Kafka sprinkled around. Moving right along, I have one more question for you sir. It appears from your explanations that you draw an almost airtight proscription against governmental tinkering in family matters. You surely know that traditional justifications for regulating 'family law' is well entrenched and broadly applied. Are you really dismissing all or most of those accumulated excuses? I hope? Thanks.

The question was originally posed in terms of Natural Law. Obviously, under different human circumstances, different approaches will be more or less useful. What works in the world of Beowulf will not necessarily do in the world of Booth Tarkington--though the world of Beowulf is becoming every day more relevant.

I'd give up the word state, with all its historical and ideological baggage. Was the Athenian polis a state? I don't think so, at least not in the sense that the UK or the USA today are states. This is much too big an issue for this column, but in general a state implies a permanent administrative system. It is not that a political community has no interest in protecting children, only that its laws and actions must not be undertaken--as they are today--in a way that destroys the very natural institution responsible for children.

I'll give two civilized examples of how it has worked in the past. In Athens, a murderer had to be prosecuted by the citizen-victim's kinfolks, while the city supplied a court. At Rome, when people were found to have violated a law prohibiting bacchanalian ceremonies, the guilty parties were turned over to their families for execution. There is probably an infinite number of possible arrangements that do not put politicians in charge of family relations.

Does a secondary obligation on the State have to override a primary obligation in the family? Perhaps if the issue were considered in a framework of justice rather than prevention? For example, a State obviously has no jurisdiction to try to prevent a parent from abusing a child since the State is just not competent in these matters (witness the latest executive fiat preventing sons of farmers in the U.S. from feeding the chickens or milking the cows because it violates "child labor laws"), but couldn't I reason that the State has an obligation to pursue justice if it is brought to light that a father murdered his child? Or if a child murdered a father? I'm not thinking of it in terms of State vs. Family (and maybe this is where I am wrong), but in terms of a State's obligation to citizens and the common good. If Citizen A murders Citizen B, then the State, preferably at the most local level, has obligations to social order & justice to fulfill. Is it a jurisdictional issue, and all things within the family are distinct from all things outside of the family?

Abortion seems slightly removed from even the above scenario since it is currently practiced as a medical procedure under licensed physicians in government approved clinics (at least in principle). Surely it can't be out of place for a State to not sanction such public facilities or license such actions? While a State cannot force a mother to bear a child, isn't the State obligated to not enable her to terminate the child?

I'm not offering any of this as an actual solution to the problem of abortion. Abortion seems a horrible symptom of the bigger problem, and I agree that that problem lies within the family and cannot be fixed through the State. But, in principle, it seems that the State should bear some secondary obligations.

Here is why I do not think Natural Law requires a state to protect the unborn. By the laws of nature, parents have a primary interest and duty to produce and rear their offspring. In a state of nature, without insanity or extreme threats, that is what primitive humans do, that is what the anthropoid apes do, that is what mammals do. A woman's obligation to bear her child transcends the state's authority, thus if a state declared that she was not permitted to bear a defective child who would be a burden on the taxpayers, a moral mother would be duty-bound to disobey.

The great sin in abortion is not that a post or pre-christian state permits such an abomination but that a mother kills the being she is most obliged to love and protect. In transferring, even in our thoughts, that responsibility to government, we are not only missing the larger moral issue, but we are heading in the direction of the unbalanced christian women, mostly Catholics, who want to adopt embryos and bear them.

By the way, I don't think under the Natural Law that a political authority is bound to protect born children who are the family's and not the government's responsibility. Obviously a decent commonwealth, pagan or Christian, will be concerned but it is not a good idea to transfer, in principle, such responsibility to the rulers of this world. The Roman patria potestas conferred a life-long responsibility on a father to determine questions of life and death for children of any age who were in his manus or potestas. This is a very complicated issue and the cases in which a father exercised such a right with impunity so very few that it indicates the strength of family attachments may be stronger where the state has only a small role than when it assumes full responsibility.

Could one make the argument that, based on science and natural law (i.e. pretty straightforward reasoning) and not religion, the State has an obligation to protect children within the womb? While things like same-sex issues and women volunteering to join the armed services involve personal decisions that, theoretically, do no harm to anyone against anyone's will, abortion does not fall into this category as at least one party in the process is unable to make a decision in his or her best interest. I think enforcement of such a policy would escape the label of tyrany of the state in the sense that the law currently protects children who are already born from being murdered by their parents.

"Issuing a mostly pointless little certificate to two cohabitating males just so that they can visit one another in a hospital or can open a joint bank account is hardly in the league of... torture, execution, detention, and forced relocation"

Tell that to young heterosexual men whom latter-day, newly-liberated and "empowered" homosexuals heckle and even rape (thus conferring HIV) on their own collective ego trip. Tell that to the Swedish pastor arrested for preaching against homosexual acts.

Yes, homosexual "liberation" has come with torture, execution and detention for those who do not care for its precepts. It is not and could not be a matter of atomised individuals leaving each other to their own libertine fantasy lives. That is not how society works. They want to change society, and they are doing so, in a way that is radically counter to anything with historical precedent. Not only is it tyranny, as Dr. Fleming defined the term, but it is cruel and inhumane to any remaining decent person.

As for Deborah and Rahab, neither was conscripted and neither were warriors, though Deborah was a rare example of a woman holding a tribal leadership position, but it would not matter much if they were. In unusual circumstances, e.g., when a city is being taken in a siege, everyone including children takes part, but that has no relevance for the general customs of the people. Besides, the Old Testament is filled with episodes of astonishing cruelty and nastiness. In the story of Deborah we meet one of the worst, the lady Jael who gives Sisera refuge only to drive a stake into his head. Christians generally treat these stories in a metaphorical manner and no morally sane person would commend the example of Jael.

A few brief responses to the good queries. First, I don't care what people call me so long as strangers do not first-name me.

Prateek does not understand marriage in the Western tradition nor does he understand what tyranny is. Tyranny in the classical sense is the assumption of illegal or untraditional authority. Oedipus is a tyrannos not because he is a murdering brute, which is is not, but because he does not rule according to custom and takes into his own hands powers that do not belong to him. Read Herodotus for examples and Aristotle for the definition. The word itself is apparently a non-Greek world which means nothing more than ruler and might best be translated as boss or strongman, not as despot or tyrant. Thus it was a tyrannical act when Creon orders Antigone not to bury her next-of-kin, as was her duty.

I wish I could agree with Mr. Hoffman but he is wrong, both historically and philosophically. There is a natural law built into our nature that permits us, even without the benefit of revelation, to discern right from wrong, it is not an absolute, at least insofar as it manifests itself in human life. "For now we see through a glass darkly..." Aristotle says Natural Justice is not like fire, which burns the same in Greece as in Persia, but like the tendency to right-handedness. (Here he was explicitly contradicting Plato.)

The Greeks were not as homophile as Sir Kenneth Dover has portrayed them, but sodomy was punished under restricted circumstances. For example, picking up slave boys or male prostitutes was not illegal while raping or seducing a citizen's son could get you in trouble with the father. Really "gay" types could be deprived of civil privileges at Athens and in principle executed if the persisted in attending the Ecclesia, but on the whole Greek society was fairly tolerant. I

Mr. Hoffman is perfectly correct in rejecting the false portrait of the ancients drawn up both by some Christians and some pop historians, but we would have to go city by city, law by law really to prove the point. Plato, by the way, who is certainly among the gayest of ancient writers, is also the worst guide imaginable to what the Greeks actually did and believed.

"In a post-Christian society we cannot expect a government to enforce Christian morality by banning infanticide or homosexuality or suicide, but we do not have to accept as legitimate policies that are radical innovations when judged by the standards of our pagan ancestors. Thus Gay marriage, the denial of parental rights over a minor's abortion, and the drafting of women can all be regarded as tyrannical actions. We may have to obey, as we obey a kidnapper, but, again, a immoral promise extorted by a kidnapper does not have to be kept."

With all due respect to you, Mr. Fleming, I can't understand why you would write this. These are questions of natural law, not the divine positive law of God, and thus we can indeed expect that any society should prohibit such things. Even pagans commonly condemned sodomy and prohibited it (Plato urges its legal condemnation in the Republic, and Hippocrates famously required his students to swear to the gods that they would not engage in abortion nor euthanasia). Condemning and prohibiting acts againts nature and the natural law is not a peculiarity of Christianity.

I think if you will read the entire discussion you will see that I have distinguished between the conscientious refusal to obey an immoral order and acts of civil disobedience in which a citizen violates an otherwise good law in order to protest a policy he does not approve of. The position of Confederates during the War was that of citizens in sovereign states that had seceded from a federal union. That, at least, was how they viewed it, taking their cue from Thomas Jefferson. After those states had signed treaties, their position was altered and they were subject to taxes, though it is possible to argue that they had been tricked into thinking the rights of the American states would be respected. It should also be noted that much of the depredation was illegal even by Union laws, e.g. the theft of cotton in warehouses and farms on the pretense that it was contraband. One may certainly conceal property from a thief, even if the thief claims to be working for government.

As for women, it is contrary to all the traditions of the civilized Christian West to conscript women. Even to permit them to serve in combat or quasi-combat units is morally offensive to the Christian conscience, and that is before we take into consideration the way women are sexually harassed in the military. I would most certainly have attempted to smuggle my daughters out of the country had they been subject to the draft.

Aristotle is careful, in discussing tyranny, to include cases where a law may be passed according to the legal forms of a democratic commonwealth but in violation of the traditions of the people. In a post-Christian society we cannot expect a government to enforce Christian morality by banning infanticide or homosexuality or suicide, but we do not have to accept as legitimate policies that are radical innovations when judged by the standards of our pagan ancestors. Thus Gay marriage, the denial of parental rights over a minor's abortion, and the drafting of women can all be regarded as tyrannical actions. We may have to obey, as we obey a kidnapper, but, again, a immoral promise extorted by a kidnapper does not have to be kept.

You stated, " If Caesar's tax-collectors show up to get his money, even though his laws permit infanticide, you pay. Christ told the Jews to render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's despite the obvious facts that many Jews regarded the Empire as alien occupiers."

Could we not use that logic to assert that southerners should have surrendered personal property to Union forces upon polite request for use in its justified pacification of the slave holding recalcitrants?

Why do believe that families should hide their women in the event that they are drafted? Would that not be in violation of the new law allowing American women in combat? Doing such a thing would be an act of cowardice, would it not? Please briefly explain your position. Thank you, sir.

You see what sort of people the nationalist right attracts, irrationalists who cannot accept any limit on their actions. Mr. Hode apparently thinks he has an absolute right to post his nonsense on my column, and so convinced is he of his righteousness that he cannot read, obviously, the statement that comments are moderated. It is just possible I have better things to do of a Sunday than read and respond to comments.

A tidbit from Breivik's court statement caught my attention: he says he practiced meditation to learn how to detach himself from his emotions, to be better at killing. Take that, Siddhartha! Wonder how this plays down at the local yoga/meditation salons .... ommm, ommm, omygosh, I'm turning into a creep!

"Dr. Fleming, whatever you may feel about Norway, is it fair to say that Norwegian society produced Breivik? Breivik was a loner, an inward-looking shyster who lived in his own world of his own imagination. How can society influence a man who was barely a part of society? In the classical Greek sense, he would be called an "idiotes", if that is the right word."

Mr. Sanjay, that is precisely the point. Norway has become a SOCIETY of idiotes, not really a society at all in any recognizable sense of the word. As has America. When some regions of the country have illegitimacy rates of 80 percent, it is easy to see why. Remember that bastardry used to be stigmatized. It seems now that the stigma was natural as well as social: bastards do not have a legitimate natural place for society and the ones who find a place have to fight an uphill battle. Regrettably not all men are so strong. Norway, like America and increasingly France and Britain, has become a country whose inhabitants know not their place and lack the courage to take one.

Breivik has something down inside that could spring a genuine love for Europe and for Norway. Indeed, I think he is close, very close! Alas, so close and so far. Breivik's parents were godless socialists and reared him as such. Breivik came to detest what he had been raised to be, and rightfully so. The problem is that he cannot apparently bring himself to throw off his godlessness and to forgive his parents. Instead, he chooses to remain bitter about it and, in a terrifying act of self-purgation, take out his hatred on the young socialists in whom he saw a mirror image of the effeminate traces he felt he could not heretofore extrapolate from himself.

Like WLW above, Breivik harbored a bitterness prevented him from walking toward the light once he saw it. Like WLW, Breivik mistook aesthetics for substance: praising Christian civilization instead of actually upholding it; constructing large muscles and an artificial square jaw instead of taking on the mundane duties and burdens of manhood; firing a gun any which way instead of having the gun and knowing how to restrain it. (Unlike WLW, however, Breivik did not only believe it was right and necessary to shed this blood, but he actually did what he believed was right and necessary. Dr. Fleming does not need me to defend him, but I can't help asking, who's the weenie, huh?)

Breivik's rationality is so narrow, however, that he simply cannot accept the power of the Light to affect change in human hearts. If Breivik could be converted from Left to Right, how could he so profoundly disbelieve that the same could happen for one or more of those socialist youths he butchered? What if one of them had turned out to be the man who would change Norway forever - for the better?

You are a typical Roman Catholic---weenie. In the face of existential metaphysical genocide, all you offer is some articles. This man put his money where his mouth is. While the Roman Catholic hierarchy are committing treason and genocide by their defense and advocation of hispanic immigration and preaching of political correctness from the pulpit---you say nothing but dump on Brevik! You're an academic pussy hiding behind some faux Christian morality while your Church promotes the genocide of Europeans.

I am at least brave enough to stand up and congratulate him for it. The Left was indoctrinating people into existential genocide. That is Treason. The penalty of Treason is death.

You have NOT done anything to stop multiculturalism or diversity or tolerance. You actually promote it. Writing words does nothing. It is by Action that things become concrete. The time of talking is over. The Left doesn't listen, doesn't want to listen. Who is going to stop them? You? what a joke. Only armed resistance can stop them.

There is a valid point to make about the culture of video games, but Prateek somewhat misses the larger picture.

First off, I don't feel much of anything about Norway, though I do have some notions. I have always been partial to the country, because my father had a Norwegian sea captain as a grandfather, and the Norwegians, compared with Swedes, were historically simpler, more pious, and hard-drinking. I knew such people in Northern Wisconsin and liked them.

Second, video games are like a drug. We like to blame everything in the world on heroin or pot or alcohol or violent games, but the abuse of such things is more a symptom than a cause. The Greeks, for example, knew the properties of cannabis--Herodotus describes savages getting stoned--and they had opium. There is virtually no evidence, however, of marijuana use and rather little of opium outside of medicine. That is because a wholesome society, with its traditions and rituals, does not leave a great empty space to be filled. That is the soul of modern man, a vast emptiness.

For this argument to be true, it does not matter whether there is a God or not, much less if Christianity is truer than other religions. Man is by nature a religious animal and when you take him out of the village, with its rites and customs, he will get lost unless he has an even larger religion than is provided by the village, My Neopagan friends pretend to mourn the loss of the little gods of tribe and countryside, but those gods were too small to satisfy the needs of cosmopolitan Greeks and Romans, and as little as the little demons of the video games are, they still serve their master.

Dr. Fleming, whatever you may feel about Norway, is it fair to say that Norwegian society produced Breivik? Breivik was a loner, an inward-looking shyster who lived in his own world of his own imagination. How can society influence a man who was barely a part of society? In the classical Greek sense, he would be called an "idiotes", if that is the right word.

A cursory evaluation of the trial shows his endless time spent on World of Warcraft, Age of Conan, and other online globally connected virtual universes that are meant to simulate artificial lives for people to live. There is no indication that he socialized outside this artificial world, doing even basic things like chatting with friends, walking in the countryside, or being a part of communal festivals. Let alone his society being a flawed one (which one isn't?), it never had a chance to make him a part of them.

It seems like, here in America, we have a long-standing tradition of stories of the lone vigilante who fights for justice outside of the framework of any actual law enforcement organization. From Natty Bumpo, the Lone Ranger, and Zorro to John Wayne in the Searchers and Bogart in the Big Sleep to Spider-Man, Superman, and Batman, we seem infatuated with the idea of the lone man who brings justice where the regular authorities fail. Even when the hero is a part of the law enforcement organization, he has to be some sort of loner within that organization, usually receiving the disapproval from the Police Chief or Commissioner for his reckless ways.

Is this unique to America? Is there any sense of this in other cultures or countries? It seems that we Americans have endorsed civic disobedience as a part of our mythology.

Breivik's particular psychosis is widely misunderstood, even by himself. He is not insane, nor is he necessarily amoral. I do think that somewhere down inside is something that could be blossomed into a full-blown love for Norway and for Europe... if only Breivik would allow it.

Breivik, alas, hates himself. Reared by socialist parents, he recounts: "I do not approve of the super-liberal, matriarchal upbringing as it completely lacked discipline and has contributed to feminising me to a certain degree."

Note that everyone that Breivik killed had the same sort of upbringing that he did, in particular the socialist youths at that summer camp.

The simplest explanation, psychologically, to Breivik’s actions is that he detested what he had been raised to be and spent much of his young adult life attempting to undo that. This explains his cosmetic surgeries, weight training and use of anabolic steroids. And it also explains his chosen targets: young socialists.

My hypothesis – and bearing in mind that this hypothesis is not at all scientific – is that Breivik saw in these young socialists a mirror image of what he had been raised to be, of what he detested. He was raised to be what he saw as a bane on Norwegian society, and as his exposé about his innaprobation of his education makes clear, he abhorred the traces of that upbringing that remained in his mind, body and soul. His decision to kill them was more an act of self-purgation than it was a practical purgation of rotten Norwegian soft-socialist politics.

Breivik's fundamental error is to mistake veneer for substance, to mistake admiration of Christian civilization for a pro-Christian mindset, to think that a Norway where one sees nothing but hulking square-jawed blue-eyed blondes (and I say this as a blue-eyed blond non-hulking Norwegian man myself) is capable of maintaining its historic Norwegianness, to believe that the muscular physique and angular physionomy so iconic of masculinity themselves amount to manhood.

Breivik's sin is bitterness, and he is no more mad than any intellectually convinced convert who will not allow himself to be fully converted and who will not let go of his bitterness at not having been converted sooner. Only when he forgives his parents for the terrible job they undoubtedly did raising him will he at last be an effective warrior against those working to destroy his country – not by shooting them but by praying that they see the light he has seen (and as of this writing covered up so effectively).

Months ago a friend and I joked that at least the victims didn't represent a "huge loss." That was ungenerous on our part. From our perspective, from what we knew that day, it may have been the truth, given what I know about how the offspring of socialist families tend to turn out (the girls as feminist dykes; the males as weenie ninnies). Yet if the future were robbed that day, as it may well have been, of a potential convert and indeed perhaps a potential convert who would have saved Norway from the likes of his former friends and parents, woe to Breivik on Judgment Day if he does not repent!

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Thomas Fleming

Thomas Fleming is editor of the American monthly, Chronicles: a Magazine of American Culture. He has written several books on ethics (The Morality of Everyday Life) and politics (Socialism, The Politics of Human Nature) and contributed to newspapers, magazines, and academic journals on both sides of the Atlantic. In an earlier life he received a Ph.D. in classics and professed Greek and Latin at several universities.